The crucial question about raising the federal debt ceiling is: What happens if Congress doesn’t? That is, what happens if Congress defaults? When President Trump returns from his “working vacation” later this month, this promises to be one of the major issues he’ll face, because the Treasury is expected to run out of cash in early or mid-October, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

Arguing economic reasons, President Trump announced that the Department of Defense will not re-recruit transgender people. Several studies indicate that the president not only takes a step back in the inclusion of the LGBT community to the Armed Forces, but that its measurement could affect the troop's morale.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy, such as it is, rests on a massive and apparently indestructible contradiction. Trump wants the United States to remain the “essential” nation, the best embodiment of Western ideals of freedom and democracy, while at the same time deliberately alienating many of our traditional “allies,” whose support the United States desperately needs. American leadership becomes difficult, if not impossible.

This is the summer of our discontent. As Americans celebrate July 4, they are mad at their leaders, mad at their government and mad at each other. A recent Pew poll finds that “public trust in government remains near historic lows.” Just 20 percent of Americans trust the government to “do the right thing just about always or most of the time.” The comparable figures were 40 percent in 2000 and almost 80 percent in the early 1960s. There has been a long-term loss of trust.

We now have a Trump Doctrine, and it is, in its conception at least, the most radical departure from a bipartisan American foreign policy since 1945. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster explain that President Trump has “a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

I am not a big or even a little fan of President Donald Trump. Many of his policies strike me as undesirable, some in the extreme. His background and temperament have not prepared him for the presidency.

Globalization has gotten a bad rap. The Trump White House associates it with all manner of economic evil, especially job loss. The administration has made undoing the damage a central part of its economic strategy. This will almost certainly fail and disappoint, because globalization’s ill-effects have been wildly exaggerated.

We have yet another study that debunks the widespread notion that robots -- and other forms of automation, including “artificial intelligence” -- will destroy our jobs and lead to a future of permanently high unemployment. According to the study, that would completely rewrite history, which has shown job creation to be an enduring strength of the U.S. economy.

Past a chalkboard that says, “Come inside to read a good book,” on one side and “Don’t be an asshole!” on the other, you come across a tattered SEPTA Union Strike poster from the early twentieth century, preserved underneath an equally withered-away lamination. A few cautious inches deep inside of this surreal time machine, a pillar manages to stand from the 1890s home of an anarchist feminist writer and speaker who lived near Drexel University.

Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, who suffered a heart attack two months ago, said he is well and and wanting to get back to work." He is waiting to play Pablo Picasso in a film by Carlos Saura showing the creative process of the famous painting "Guernica."

President Trump’s $1.1 trillion spending plan considers deep cuts to domestic, aid programs, while boosting military spending. All these cuts could hurt low-income Americans, including some of Trump’s own supporters.

The same may be true of the economy. So says Tyler Cowen, author of the new book “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

Although we’ve recovered from the Great Recession, there are widespread fears that the economy will stagnate or grow only slowly. Government won’t be able to handle the next crisis, whether a war, financial meltdown or pandemic.

We live in an age of disbelief. Many of the ideas and institutions that have underpinned Americans’ thinking since the early years after World War II are besieged. There is an intellectual and political vacuum into which rush new figures (Donald Trump) and different ideas (America First). These new ideas and leaders may be no better than the ones they displace -- they may, in fact, be worse -- but they have the virtue of being new.

Perhaps it’s just me, but a few weeks into the Trump presidency, between the tweets, executive orders, attacks and counterattacks, I feel dizzy. So I’ve decided to take a break from the daily barrage and try to find the signal amid the noise: What is the underlying philosophy of this administration?

In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Jessica Mathews points out that since 1945, Americans of both political parties have accepted three principles. First, that America’s security is enhanced by its broad and deep alliances around the world. Second, that an open global economy is not a zero-sum game but rather allows America to prosper and others to grow. And finally, while there was debate about whether dictatorships were to be “tolerated, managed, or confronted,” in the end there was a faith in democracy and its advantages.

The question that swirls around Donald Trump’s inaugural address is whether his aggressively pronounced policy of America First will actually result in America Last -- not literally last, but declining in power and prestige because the United States no longer views its role in the world as promoting economic and geopolitical stability for our allies.